Introduction Sam Shepard’s Buried Child is not the America of white picket fences, cheerful families, and fertile cornfields we often imagine. Instead, it pulls us into a decaying farmhouse in Illinois, where the once‑glorious American Dream has collapsed into silence, denial, and moral rot. The smiling family portrait has cracked; the land is barren, and the heart of the home hides a dark, disturbing secret buried in its backyard. This is Shepard’s version of the Dream gone wrong—a haunting landscape where the...